Frederic's writing: the editor's feedback and writing for oneself

Frederic says he sought feedback on his writing because his audience is tiny - two books over ten years with about one buyer, one subscriber, one reader per article.

A professional editor said the writing is good but the structure and context are the problem, suggesting he either expand the pieces into full stories with detail or make them shorter, and that his point is often unclear - which Frederic acknowledges, since he is not making a point.

The Wonders reply that he went to the wrong person: professional editors are used to large books with beginnings, middles, ends, chapters, plots and subplots, whereas he needs someone interested in poetry or short stories.

They characterize his work as musings of the mind and suggest he could simply collect them under a title such as 'Musings of a Mind', joking he might double his readership from one to two.

The core advice is not to write in order to sell - it is not his passion and never will be, and any money made would surprise everyone.

He should write for himself, whether a word, a sentence, a paragraph or a page, because what matters is that he writes; over time he will accumulate an encyclopedia of material that can be combined into a bigger story or a book of musings, and its value does not depend on whether one person or a thousand see it.

Frederic agrees he has no wish to do the marketing; the Wonders observe that his favourite pastime is sitting on a mountaintop navel gazing, and that climbing down to persuade people to buy his book is something he will almost certainly never do - hiring an agent would just mean paying someone, no better than paying a student ten dollars to read it.

The deeper reason to write, they say, is that what stays in his mind clutters it: putting it on paper lets him forget it and frees room for new thoughts, ideas, constructs and creativity.

Later he could find a commonality in the accumulated material and make it into a manuscript that helps others, at which point he should find an editor who understands it as musings meant to help others on their journeys - not as a commercial success.

They also identify a psychology at work: writing is an anathema to him because his father did it and he does not want to be like him, so if he writes he feels he must then be successful.

On his idea of needing something else when he is too old for office work, they point out he is already effectively retired - sitting in a company doing very little, remotely, for eight hours' pay, which is passive income and the epitome of retirement - and that if he stopped walking and exercising he would be too old to sit.

With his sharp mind he will always be at the forefront of technology and telling people what to do.

The repeated message is to stop imagining himself in everyone else's formula and create his own life.